up?” Charly asked. He was afraid to answer truthfully. She leaned against the billiards table, her eyes bright. Were those actually tears? She was crying for him? “No one ever will,” she whispered. “Not even Tara could’ve measured up. She’s not around to get into fights with you or look at you with disappointment or burn the house down with her cooking.”
He’d take offense if her voice didn’t sound so understanding “What are you saying?”
“You’ll never find anyone who can possibly replace her.”
She’d surprised him with that—not even his guy friends were so cavalier about the loss, and in a way it reached him like nothing else had. “Thanks for the pep talk?”
“Just reality,” she said with a sad smile. “You’re hurting and you’re going to keep hurting over and over. It makes sense to be afraid of anything good, because what if we lose it?” She took a deep breath. “But we can’t wrap our hearts up in bubble wrap to keep ourselves from never hurting again, no matter how much we want to.”
She was definitely talking from experience. He gulped the dryness from his throat. “You lost someone too?”
Her eyes clouded with pain. “I lost my twin sister to a car accident a few years ago.”
More than anything, he wished he could take away her hurt. No one should go through what they had. “I’m sorry.”
She took a deep breath. “We had our bad days, our fights—she was human—but we had more good days, and I just miss her. But that’s okay, you know? Of course she left a hole when she was gone. She was great, so I should miss her.” Charly played with her fingers before trapping them against the billiard table behind her.
He stepped closer and froze, fighting the urge to comfort her like she had him, because if he did, he might face things he didn’t want to face. Charly held nothing back about how she mourned her sister, but so far, everything Aaron had told her about Tara was clinical, nothing too deep or too personal. Sharing this pain together would be like ripping out his heart; it would be just as agonizing as the first time he’d lost Tara. He was terrified of staring at the hole she’d left behind and finding something deeper that he wasn’t ready to look at too closely. I can’t.
“The thing that I didn’t expect was the guilt.” She gulped a few times, then wiped the back of her hand against her eyes. “Every time I experienced something new without her felt like I was betraying her somehow, or I was making her disappear. You ever feel like that?”
Even as the sorrow and anger twisted at his insides, he tried to shrug it off. “I’m not ready to let her go, if that’s what you mean.” He watched Charlize almost resentfully. Tara would’ve hated all the other women he’d dated, but Charlize? No, she was exactly the kind of girl Tara was thinking of when she’d asked him to love again. But he’d been terrified that someone like Charly might make him forget Tara. He groaned. Was that why he’d stayed away from someone like this—this amazing woman standing before him? What was he doing?
Charly’s eyes were wet with tears; her gaze was soft, gentle, kind. His heart dropped—this was good and very, very bad. “I don’t want to lose Tara again.” The admission came out strangled. The tears pricking at his eyes felt hot, painful, angry. He blinked, letting them fall, not hiding anything from Charly now. Wasn’t Tara worth the pain? She’d better be, because a new wave of grief hit him as raw and powerfully as the day he’d lost her. Charlize let out a dismayed sound. Her tender arms found him and he let his tears get lost in the softness of her hair.
“My mom told me that Rio would always be a part of me.” Charlize’s words almost got lost against his chest. He never thought a voice so soft would pierce him to the core like hers did. He stilled and listened intently. “As long as I live, she lives on through me because she made me who I am. She taught me to love. And I should be better because of her, not worse.” His pulse felt like it was thudding through his ears. Yes, Tara would approve of Charly, and it scared him. “I can’t tell you how to feel,” she said, “but the more you put yourself into